Methodology and tools for the development of high performance parallel systems with SDL/MSCs

The Specification and Description Language SDL and Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are widely used in the telecommunication industry to support the software development process. In the paper, a methodology and a set of tools are described for the development of high performance parallel systems in the context of SDL and MSCs. While SDL and MSCs only support the formal specification of functional aspects of the system, we propose (1) the extension of MSCs to include non-functional requirements as the performance requirements of the application and (2) the annotation of SDL specifications with the respective execution cost on the parallel system. The formalization of non-functional aspects yields a set of benefits for system development: it allows the full integration of performance issues in all phases of the design process, starting from the requirements specification down to the final parallel implementation. It supports the automatization of performance related design decisions and allows the use of sophisticated tools supporting the performance optimization process.